There will be art: The Getty Villa and Getty Center in Los Angeles

Getty Villa

Getty Museum Courtyard

The late oil tycoon J. Paul Getty rather off-handedly created two massive monuments to himself in Los Angeles: The Getty Villa and the Getty Center, which are probably the leading tourist attractions for grownups (I would say “for adults,” but “adult” seems to mean “porn” these days). A much better use of massive oil profits than, say, spreading ignorance about anthropogenic global climate change. Although they are both billed as art museums, the architecture is what knocks your socks off.

The Villa, on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, requires reservations, which you can usually get online a day in advance in the winter, but more advance planning would be advisable at other times. Admission is free, but they do charge 15 dollars/vehicle for parking. The collection features antiquities of Greek, Roman and Etruscan origin. They are housed in a “campus” of buildings loosely based on the architecture of ancient Pompeii. Tours and films (and occasional lectures and symposia) are available free of charge and are listed in a little handout “Today at the Getty Villa”; early arrival is recommended to get the best selection. Flocks of docents, guards, and other staff are constantly at hand. The cafe is nice and the gift shop well-stocked.

Getty Center, which includes the J. Paul Getty Museum, is roughly ten times the size of the Villa. It is located in LA on the 405 just north of Sunset Blvd. Reservations are not required, admission is free, though there is a charge for parking. Closed Mondays and major holidays. The architecture (by Richard Meier), location and views are spectacular. A brief orientation film is shown continuously in the Museum entrance hall. The collections include a wide variety of art including photographs, sculpture, paintings and furniture. The modern era is under-represented. While the Impressionist collection is impressive, it is really in the medieval and religious collections that the Getty is unique among large American museums. Tours, lectures and other events are listed in “Today at the Getty Center”, available free in the Museum entrance hall. Audio devices are available to rent for $5, but are not necessary for the average tourist; the exhibits are largely self-explanatory. Food and beverages are available all over the campus. As for the Villa, the ideal plan would be to arrive at the Center early, have a pleasant and scenic lunch after a couple of hours, and wander about as long as the feet hold up, finishing at the gift/book shop. You can’t see it all in a day, unless that is your goal.

Did Mark Sanford go to Argentina because he was rejected by eHarmony.com?

In another stunning development in the ongoing Mark Sanford fiasco, Over the Line, Smokey! has learned that Sanford may have been trying to “dig some potatoes” a little closer to home than Argentina, but was rejected by eHarmony.com, because of a statement he made in his application:

Over the Line, Smokey! cannot vouch for the authenticity of this document, although it was obtained from a reliable source.*

*the internet, I think it’s called.

All foreign calls are being tapped. Period. All. Totally.

Attorney General Mukasey is spreading the fear, in order to scare Congress into legalizing Bush’s/telecom’s lawless surveillance. It’s clear why the Bush administration won’t bother with warrants, and it always has been. They just won’t admit it.

All phone calls coming to and from the US are being monitored en masse. It’s a total, mass, automated, all-encompassing system.

They work at the level of the massive trunk lines as they enter and leave the country, not at the level of some individual phone.  So they get ALL CALLS.

Every call. All calls. each call. your call, my call. his call, her call; Russ Feingold’s call…. tous les calls. All the time. All day, all night, weekends. 24/7/365.

That’s why they can’t bother with warrants and probable cause and suspicion and evidence and judges and rights. They have no evidence. They are just sifting through everything. Looking for particular words. Grabbing the words, guessing what thoughts might be behind the words. Policing the minds.

It’s an automated machine. Think of a huge net thrown over the entire ocean: no individual fish has any rights..the net can’t respect any rights. They are wiretapping the calls of every person in the United States, if they talk to anyone overseas. It demolishes the entire idea of freedom from unreasonable search.
And it’s not just a search issue.

In effect, every call is being censored. Think of it. Every call from every journalist in Iraq is being monitored, and so is every elected official in the US who might get any information from overseas. How can anyone talk about the Middle East without using words that would make the alarms go off? He who controls the flow of information controls the public mind.

And it operates in total secrecy. No one knows what words and phrases will trigger the alarms, or what happens next, in terms of lists and investigations, and how you are ever cleared of suspicion. We can be pretty confident that Bush’s Pioneer donor lists are a get out of jail free card, and that Democratic governors are a free fire zone, but that’s about all we can guess.

Temperature in Angisoq, Greenland: a balmy 32 degrees

link

I may take a ride up to Angisoq; supposed to be this warm for the rest of the week. Better pack my sunscreen.

Where your kids’ savings are going

NY Times

Nonstop Theft and Bribery Are Staggering Iraq

Jobless men pay $500 bribes to join the police. Families build houses illegally on government land, carwashes steal water from public pipes, and nearly everything the government buys or sells can now be found on the black market.

“Everyone is stealing from the state,” said Adel Adel al-Subihawi, a prominent Shiite tribal leader in Sadr City, throwing up his hands in disgust. “It’s a very large meal, and everyone wants to eat.”

Corruption and theft are not new to Iraq, and government officials have promised to address the problem. But as Iraqis and American officials assess the effects of this year’s American troop increase, there is a growing sense that, even as security has improved, Iraq has slipped to new depths of lawlessness.

…

One recent independent analysis ranked Iraq the third most corrupt country in the world. Of 180 countries surveyed, only Somalia and Myanmar were worse, according to Transparency International, a Berlin-based group that publishes the index annually.

And the extent of the theft is staggering. Some American officials estimate that as much as a third of what they spend on Iraqi contracts and grants ends up unaccounted for or stolen, with a portion going to Shiite or Sunni militias. In addition, Iraq’s top anticorruption official estimated this fall — before resigning and fleeing the country after 31 of his agency’s employees were killed over a three-year period — that $18 billion in Iraqi government money had been lost to various stealing schemes since 2004.

The collective filching undermines Iraq’s ability to provide essential services, a key to sustaining recent security gains, according to American military commanders.

How to obtain YOUR Homeland Security travel records

For the first nine months of his administration, Bush sat around and ignored warnings about a 9-11-like attack, from the outgoing Clinton administration, the CIA and from its director, George Tenet; from his daily presidential briefings, and Bush even ignored the news of the attack. The 9/11 attacks could have been prevented under existing laws. The FBI had more data than they could handle, even then. But Bush and the darker forces at work in this country have now used 9-11 as an excuse to compile massive amounts of information on you and me…travel records, phone calls, internet postings, emails, even personal mail.
Your government has way too much information on you; since you are not a terrorist, how will they use it? any way they want to. They may use it against you politically, sell it, lose it, give it away, bungle it, or in as yet undreamed of ways, screw you with it.

You can at least see the unclassified part of it.

LINK

You have to download a couple forms, mail them in, and wait around for a month.

Book review: William Alsup’s “Missing in the Minarets: The Search for Walter A. Starr, Jr.”

This is a small book but a very interesting read. The subject is the death of a prominent young mountaineer in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California in 1933, and the subsequent search for his body. I don’t think I am giving anything away by stating that they did find it.

The author brings in a considerable amount of material about the early days of moutaineering and the Sierra Club, and some relevant information about Starr’s family and friends. There are a number of previously unpublished photographs taken during the search; unfortunately, they are, like many other photos in the book, just pictures of mountains. Thankfully, there are several diagrams and maps which help to clarify the lay of the land. Still, the inability to really show the routes of the climbers is a deficiency; this seems to be a characteristic of this book genre. I don’t see why it’s so difficult, and I don’t see why authors and editors don’t understand the issue. All it would take is three or four well-chosen photographs (or even drawings) with the routes drawn in. Instead, there are the inevitable thousand words, which don’t provide an adequate mental image of the terrain, and inevitably make one’s head spin trying to understand the attempts at descriptions of spatial relationships.
The family had made the rather bizarre request that the remains be interred where he died. Well, such an effort on a hazardous spot on a huge rock mountain leads to certain (shall we say) consequences. The author ends with a fascinating description of a recent visit to the site.

I recommend this book, giving it a 3.5 out of 4.

The Taos News goes online.

well, I mean, I just noticed they have been online.  Maybe they’ve been online for months. or years.  With New Mexico, you just never know what century they’re operating in, at any given moment.

Taosenos: Upscale, laid back, trustfunders, ethnic poor, racially mixed, overqualified, underskilled, B&B’s, healers and woodcutters, hyphenated names, Indian dancers and developers. Just your typical small town. Maybe a bit more complicated. At least one good laugh and a few weird stories every week.

For instance:

The Taos Town Council voted unanimously Thursday evening to remove the entire Planning and Zoning Commission on charges of it made “arbitrary and capricious” decisions.

and

A 4 p.m. motorcycle accident on July 15 left one woman dead and three other motorcyclists injured.

Local police are still trying to determine the cause of the accident, in which two Harley Davidson bikes collided in the 500 block of Paseo del Pueblo Sur.

The lake that gave Mission Dolores its name and location, and how it came back to life in the 1906 earthquake

thumbnail of old map

The City of San Francisco was named after the Catholic mission there, which was in turn named after St. Francis of Assisi. But the Mission there is almost universally referred to as the Mission Dolores. Apparently, it was named informally after a small lake (or a lagoon within the lake) upon whose shores it was built. Early Spanish explorers gave the lake the name Lago de las Dolores because they saw Indians weeping on its bank, or because it happened to be raining that day. The mission was built there because it seemed to be a good place to obtain fresh water and grow crops. The lake no longer exists; it has been largely filled in and almost forgotten.

The best way to understand the lake is to go to the southwest corner of 17th and Mission, and look up and down both streets. You will notice that you are actually in the center of a basin that has been somewhat filled in but is still about 20 feet deep, that extends several blocks in every direction.

The spot at the southwest corner of 17th and Mission is very near what was the deepest part of the lake. The lake extended about two blocks in all directions. If you look west on 17th street, you can see that the Mission Dolores is three blocks away, at Dolores between 16th and 17th.

Now walk west on 17th a block and a half to Albion, which marks roughly the western shore of the lake; look north up Albion a half block to Camp, where the fathers built their first crude shelter, June 29, 1776.

Now walk a few feet farther west on 17th and turn south down Dearborn, still the shore of the old lake, to 18th. You have now reached the creek which fed the lake. Look to your right, west, up the creek, on 18th, past the BiRite Market, past the edge of Dolores Park, toward the heights of Twin Peaks.

Looking west on 18th, from Dearborn

This was a ravine, called Arroyo de las Dolores, containing the creek coming down from Twin Peaks. The Mission Dolores was built one city block north from the edge of the ravine and about the same distance west from the shore of the lake, and dedicated in 1791. Water exited the lake at about what is now 16th and Howard, going east down 16th, and then draining generally east to the Mission Bay tidal wetlands and then to the San Francisco Bay.

Bayard Taylor who saw the Mission valley in 1849 says: “Three miles from San Francisco is the old mission of Dolores situated in a sheltered valley which is watered by a perpetual stream fed from the tall peaks towards the sea. * * * Several former miners in anticipation of a great influx of emigrants in the spring, pitched their tents on the best spots along Mission creek and began preparing the ground for gardens. The valley was surveyed and staked into lots almost to the summit of the mountains” (Eldorado pp. 64, 298-9).

As is implied in the passage above, eventually the lake was drained and filled in with dirt, and built over. In 1906, the loose fill dirt created havoc during the earthquake).

According to a recent geologic paper:

The ground deformation on Valencia Street between 18 and 19th streets was arguably the single most devastating event of the 1906 earthquake. …

One eyewitness describes a famous scene on Valencia:

link

Along Valencia Street from 21st to 17th, there was a hole big enough to bury at least 50 people, not to mention horses. The old Valencia Street Hotel, where I had played sliding over the banister, was lying flat on the ground and all the people in it had lost their lives, was the report.

Valencia Street was an old creekbed, [actually the creek ran through there, but it was perpendicular to Valencia, more or less under 18th Street; but whether it was the lake site or the creek site that collapsed is of little importance.] which had been filled in and then built on. The severe jolts of the quake caused the soft-packed fill to settle suddenly, leaving gaping holes in the street. The buildings on top of the fill reeled with the force of this settling, and houses for several blocks leaped off their foundations. The four-story Valencia Hotel [718 Valencia, almost at 18th Street] collapsed like a tower of cards. Its top floor landed intact in the middle of the street with the bottom three floors flattened underneath, crushing at least 15 people. [Here is my favorite image looking north at the Valencia Hotel and surroundings, and here is another image, from the other side of the hotel, looking south.]

This scene found its way into the 1936 movie San Francisco. As Clark Gable searches desperately through the city’s rubble for Jeannette MacDonald, he comes upon the collapsed hotel. A policeman tells him, “Those on the top floor stepped right out their windows to the street. The others were out of luck.”

That this was literally true can be seen in this photo.
Another eyewitness recalled:

I was curious to see the nearest fire at the corner of 22nd and Mission St. Our house was located at 931 Dolores Street in the block between the 22nd and 23rd Streets. As I ran across Valencia St. going to the Mission St. fire, I noticed on my left down Valencia St. a small old three-story hotel. (Evidently it had been built over a subterranean faultline.) The first story had partly sank in the earth while the second and third had fallen out into the street. That was the first structural destruction I had witnessed.

Another image of the Valencia Hotel can be seen here

Here is another image looking north along Valencia toward 18th. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that the ground is trying to collapse down to the right or east, down the old watercourse that was covered over by 18th St, with some help from broken water mains.

The total devastation of Valencia in the area of 19th and farther north can be seen here, in the aftermath of the fire that swept through a few days later, burning most everything north of 20th Street. Partly because the Mission Dolores was built west of the lake on solid ground, and thus not in the later fill, it was undamaged in the 1906 quake.

Much of the Mission District was in ruins but, unlike many other areas of the city, it did not burn in the first two days. The shifting soil apparently ruptured the water mains between Valencia and Mission, but the fire department was able to keep the Mission District from burning by using the Twin Peaks water coming out of the hydrants on Valencia.

At the fire which destroyed the building at the northwest corner of Mission and 22nd streets immediately after the earthquake, there was no water to be had east of Valencia Street, but the double hydrant at the northwest corner of 22nd and Valencia and the southwest corner of Valencia and 21st St. furnished an abundant supply, which, with the aid of the cistern at 22nd and Shotwell St., extinguished the fire.

Some of the damage along Valencia, in fact, was probably caused by the burst water mains:

Botzbach was a bookkeeper at the Valencia Hotel, where it is believed at least 80 people were initially trapped by the quake, and later killed by the firestorm that swept through the city. Some are also believed to have drowned by burst water mains which flooded the collapsed hotel.

A geologic investigation in the aftermath of the earthquake provides more interesting details of the upheavals along Valencia.

Science tackles the eternal question “Who farted?”

This could add some REAL in-flight entertainment.

link

Researchers developing a system that uses mathematical models and sensors to locate passengers releasing hazardous materials or pathogens inside airline cabins have shown that the technique can track a substance to an area the size of a single seat.

I assume that after detection of the offending “seat,” there will be spotlights, flashing red lights, and PA announcements.

Wow, how embarrassing to have to admit to your wife why you got put on the no-fly list…..